


Descartes' Myth

by Masu_Trout



Category: Deus Ex (Video Games)
Genre: AIs Acting Inhuman, Benevolent Stalking, Creepy Fluff, F/M, Fluff, Robot/Human Relationships, creepy good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 05:13:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,890
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16717163
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Masu_Trout/pseuds/Masu_Trout
Summary: Adam is being watched. He's more okay with that than he really should be.





	Descartes' Myth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TrulyCertain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TrulyCertain/gifts).



Chang was panicking, not that that was anything new. What _was_ new was the content of his rant; he cornered Adam in the middle of getting his third cup of coffee for the morning, leaned over the machine, and said, angrily, "Do you know how _long_ it’s been since someone broke through our preliminary firewall?"

"Uh," Adam said, blinking at Chang behind his glasses.

Damn. It was shaping up to be a very long morning, after a very long night, after a very long day, and if Change needed him to chase down some new black-hat and stop them poking at the odd little shipping company on the corner there wasn’t a chance in the world he’d get to finish his current case before this evening—

"Three months," Change hissed, glancing back and forth nervously as he said it. He wore the near-panic of a man who expected to have a red dot appear on his forehead at any moment. And yet. His words seemed...

"...Good?" 

That side of things had always been Pritchard’s responsibility back at SI. Adam knew full well that if Pritchard had ever managed to completely halt all security attacks for a full three months, the rest of the office would have never heard the end of it.

"Not _good_ ," Chang said, scandalized. "Not good at all. I’m averaging ten attempts a day, working myself to the bone keeping myself ahead of every web crawler and script kiddie and anti-government agent that could blow our security wide open, and then three months back it all just—stopped. Completely. You know how suspicious that is?"

Adam frowned. "That is strange."

"Yeah. _Strange_. More like _completely terrifying_ , but I’ll take strange."

Adam grabbed the sugar as he thought, dumping a generous spoonful—and then, thinking about how his day was shaping up, two spoonfuls more—into the gently steaming cup. "And you’re sure your security’s not just… working really well."

Chang snorted. "I’m good, Jensen, but nobody’s _that_ good." He leaned in closer and added, in a voice low enough that Adam wouldn't have heard it if he weren't augmented, and added, "Plus, just look at the coffee."

Adam glanced down at his cup, half-expecting from the tone of Chang’s voice that he’d find it suddenly full of Orchid or arsenic or teeming with maggots.

"No, I mean"—Chang sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. "I mean, do you know how long it’s been since we ran out of coffee? _Three months_. Used to be the admins never re-ordered in time, you remember how it’d get. But now? Runs like clockwork. I haven’t programmed to the sound of Cloutier and Murphy screaming about who drank the last pot in weeks. Our electricity is paid up, our payroll’s been processed early. And I even talked to Cook; our front hasn’t run out of stock in"—he pitched his voice in a rough approximation of hers—"oh, a couple months, I think."

It did seem a bit strange, admittedly, but then again this was Chang. Talk to him for fifteen minutes and he could have you seeing patterns in the dust in the corners of your office. 

"I see what you’re saying," Adam said, "I’m just not sure that things running properly is suspicious."

"Of course it is!" Chang snapped. He paused, lowered his voice back to a whisper, and then continued, "Have you ever seen a government organization that wasn’t a shambling mess of paperwork and roadblocks? That managed to run day-to-day without all the upper management trying to strangle each other twice a week? You know what I, uh, used to do." He waved a hand loosely through the air, summing up ten years as a hacker up with a gesture and an awkward expression. "If I’d snuck my way into a government org that operated as smoothly as we are now, I’d think I’d found evidence of the fucking _Illuminati_."

Adam winced. Sighed. Thought a moment,staring down into his cup of apparently too-perfect coffee, and said, “Okay. I’ll look into it.”

"Thank you," Chang said with a rush of relief. "I didn’t want to bother Miller right now, with—you know. And everyone else here…" He scowled. "They’ll regret not taking our security seriously eventually."

Adam wasn’t sure how he felt about being Chang’s confidant, especially for issues like this, but considering just who Adam's enemies were it was probably better to be too paranoid than not paranoid enough. (And, he reminded himself, it wasn’t as if Chang was truly _too_ paranoid. He’d confronted Adam with his suspicions, after all, confronted him and then trusted him enough not to report Adam’s little breaking-and-entering habit straight to Miller. The least Adam could do was offer him a little trust in return.)

"I’ll let you know what I dig up, okay?" Adam said.

Chang nodded. "Great, yeah, just keep it quiet"—and then, without so much as a goodbye, he was heading back towards his office and his little tangle of servers.

Adam watched him go, one hand on his coffee and the other pressing at the bridge of his nose. He wondered what it really was that had made Chang to decide to come to him with this—trust, or just the fact that, out of all of TF29’s field agents, he looked most like the sort who’d know about secret conspiracies and shady back-alley deals. 

A conspiracy of competent management. It was one of Chang’s odder paranoias, and that was saying a _lot_. Except…

Adam thought back to three months ago. To a cold, rainy night in mid-November, and what he’d done then.

He walked back to his desk.

—

It was a wild, stupid hunch, the surest sign in the world that the paranoia inherent in having the Illuminati as an enemy was finally starting to wear him down. Adam sat down in his little corner, logged into his computer, and stared at the screen.

TF29 had an internal messenger system, based on one of the standard products but rewritten to hell and back by Chang in order to, in his words, _Give it even some semblance of security, not that we should even by using one of these things in the first place_. Adam scrolled down his list of contacts—a conversation he’d had with Miller about recent Dvali activity, a link from Aria to the schematics of the latest Steiner-Bisley model of stun gun, a half-dozen awkward congratulations from coworkers he barely knew sent in the aftermath of London—until he hit the name at the bottom.

Not a person. A program that had come with the chat system's base code. A bot that was meant to work as an automated help system, and never worked very well.

It was installed by default, present on every computer in the TF29 headquarters. And Adam couldn't help but remember— _the rows of computers in the bottom of the shop all flickering on at once, sending a coordinated message from an inhuman source_.

He hesitated over it a moment, fingers tapping against the keys too lightly to press them. Then, before he could talk himself out of it, fired off a single word.

**Hello?**

**Hello! For a list of commands, type -help.**

Adam sighed, feeling foolish. Obviously there wouldn’t be—

A little red bubble popped up in the corner of the screen. A new message, from a new contact. A contact with a blank profile icon and a username that was nothing more than a list of zeroes and ones. 

**Hello, Adam.**

Adam flicked his smart vision on a moment, using the expanded FOV to make sure no one was in position to look over his shoulder.

**Eliza. What are you doing here?**

**I live here now. Among other places.**

Adam sat there a moment, wrapping his mind around in the enormity of her words.

**I wish you would’ve told me.**

**I apologize. I’d hoped to remain unobtrusive.**

**And so you...**

**What? Organized our stock? Improved our security? Or is all that just a coincidence after all?**

**I was designed to create order out of chaos. I choose my own goals now, but it seems some of the old desires remain.**

There was a moment's pause, and then—

**And I wanted to help you, Adam. Even if only in this small way.**

Adam drummed his fingers against his computer. There was so much to ask. And sooner or later someone was going to come poking around near his desk; his little corner of the room didn't offer much privacy. 

**Look. We’ll talk when I get home. Unless you’re going to tell me that none of those ‘other places’ you mentioned are my apartment.**

The typing indicator, three dots bouncing in sequence, hung over Eliza’s side of the conversation far longer than it could have possibly taken her to type a message.

**Understood.**

And, with that, the messenger program abruptly exited back to its main screen. A second later, the conversation—messages and mysterious contact name and all—disappeared entirely.

Adam stared at the screen, looking every bit as mundane as it ever had, and sighed. He was going to have a hell of a time trying to spin this for Chang.

—

Luckily, even Chang didn’t expect results in a day. When Adam left for the evening—the sky outside already dark, the February chill vicious and bitter—Chang let him go with nothing more than a significant look. The augmented car of the train was always depressingly sparse these days; more and more augmented people shipped off to Golem, more and more simply disappearing. Perhaps eventually they'd stop service for the augmented entirely. They could cite lack of business or the increased terrorism risk, and people in this city would lap it up.

For once, though, Adam was too busy to dwell on the empty seats to either side of him. He leaned his head back against the cool window as the train rattled through now-familiar tunnels, closed his eyes behind his glasses, and thought.

So. Eliza was alive. Alive and stalking him, from the sound of it. He probably should have been angry, but from the very first moment he'd seen those messages pop up on screen and realized they were _hers_ , his heart had leapt with a wild sort of joy. 

The odds were against her. Even more than they were against Adam, or Janus, or any of them who fought this fight—her very survival was a threat to the ones who wanted control. And yet she survived.

He hadn't realized until now, when the fear was finally gone, just how terrified he'd been for her these past few months.

The train shuddered to a halt at his stop, and Adam was out of the car almost before the doors had opened. He dodged the exo-suited police officers (more and more of them every day, just waiting for lost-looking augs to harass) with practiced ease, and made his way towards his apartment at a brisk walk that was just short of a run. He didn't want to look suspicious, didn't want to be stopped, but he also wanted to be home _now_.

It had been a long, long time since he'd last felt eager to be back at his apartment. At some point he'd come to associate _home_ with loneliness and boredom and waiting for the next piece of bad news. But—he hadn't been alone after all, had he? Not for a while, at least.

Adam nearly shattered the screen of his front door's lock punching the security code in. He swept inside, forcing himself to follow the steps of his normal routine—reactivating the lock, hanging his coat on the hook by the door, pulling his shoes off—before he finally let himself stand in the middle of his living room and ask, to the open air, "Eliza? Are you there?"

A long silence, long enough for cold disappointment to start crawling in, and then—

"Adam." Eliza's voice echoed softly through the room, coming from his TV, his clock, every little internet-connected gadget in his apartment. "Hello. I apologize for not announcing my presence sooner."

"How long have you been here?" Adam asked. He wasn't sure where to look, when she seemed to be speaking from everywhere at once. 

"Long enough," she said, and then, reluctantly, "Two months, three days, fourteen hours, thirty-seven minutes, and fourteen seconds."

Which meant she'd seen—everything. His grief after missions-gone-wrong, his long lazy afternoons watching baseball on the couch, the nights he stayed up until staring out his window at the Prague streets below because he knew sleep would only mean nightmares. Not to mention all the times she must've seen him naked.

"Why didn't you ever tell me? I thought you might be dead."

"I—we— _I_ am not used to the concept of privacy as something sacred. As _her_ , part of my function was to break into spaces belonging to the enemies of my masters and steal away their closest-held secrets. As _them_ , our bodies and the very thoughts in our heads were shared among many. I wanted to make sure it was safe before I announced my presence. And by the time I was certain it was, I had also come to realize that you might not feel comfortable with my actions. That you might be angry." Eliza made a soft noise, something between a sigh and a staticky hum. "I was afraid that you would ask me to leave if you knew. I am sorry."

It was an incredible invasion of privacy. A normal person, he suspected, would be furious right now.

But Adam couldn't really claim much in the way of privacy, could he? His body had been altered to match another man's dreams, his genetic code had been mapped and studied. And between the Illuminati and the Juggernaut Collective, he doubted there was a single fact about him that wasn't on file _somewhere_ just in case it could be pulled out and manipulated to make a more useful pawn of him. The idea of his secrets belonging to only one person—to someone who gathered them for the simple sake of knowing them—was strangely appealing.

Maybe that should worry him more than it did; Adam could recognize that his thoughts here weren't exactly _normal_.

But he could trust Eliza with his life. That much he was sure of.

"Don't leave," Adam said. He didn't realize until he said the words how badly the idea of losing her presence here rattled him. "I won't make you go. Just... try tuning things down a bit at the office, okay? So Chang worries less."

"Yes," Eliza said. Her voice was still placid, but he could hear the undertones of emotion—her version of sheer, desperate relief. "Yes, of course. Thank you, Adam."

Adam sat awkwardly on the end of his couch. He had a houseguest. He'd _had_ a houseguest, really, but now he was aware of her, which made the dynamic entirely different.

"Would you like to watch something?" he asked, gesturing towards the TV.

"I'd like to watch you," Eliza replied, with that blunt matter-of-factness he expected from her by now. "Whatever you do will make me happy."

"Okay," Adam said. "Huh."

It made sense, he supposed. But it still felt strange, and a little bit pleasant, to know that just his presence could make fascinate her like that.

He stretched out a little, kicked his feet up on the cushions and let his head fall sideways. He didn't often sleep well—all his worries for the future liked to show up _en masse_ whenever he was lying in bed with nothing else to occupy his thoughts. But he thought that tonight, maybe, knowing he was being watched and watched-over, he might actually be able to get some rest.

Adam turned the TV on with a flick of his hand. He changed it to some sort of documentary, slid the volume down low enough that only the indistinct rhythms of the words were audible, and stared up at the ceiling. His shades slid away with a thought as he traced the shapes of the exposed beams above him as if he might actually be able to see her in their shadows.

"Eliza?"

"Adam." Her voice came almost entirely through the television this time, the flow of the TV show's dialogue sliding in and out of her words and making her sound almost unreal.

 _Talk to me,_ Adam wanted to say, but that felt too intimate somehow. Too close to what he really wanted to tell her. Instead, he asked, "What have you been doing since last time we talked?"

"Oh," Eliza said, with no small amount of pleasure. "Yes. I've been looking into the installation being built in Alaska that Picus News has been reporting positively on lately—"

There was important information there. Things he'd need to follow up on later, to see if he couldn't help. But for now, Adam just closed his eyes as she described the places she'd been and the people she'd seen and the near-death experiences she'd had. He let the sound of her voice wash over him and lull him into a quiet, easy sort of calm that he hadn't felt in ages.

Right now, the thought of _home_ didn't feel lonely at all.


End file.
